The Xyne Chronicles

So, my compatriots and I are working on a game, Xyne. Xyne is 2 wizards fighting on a battle field using their wits and spells. The 2 main mechanics that drive the game is a puzzle game that basically fuels a card game. You cast spells during your battle with the other wizard but they have a cost. The cost is actually a set of gems in a certain pattern. To get gems in these patterns, you play the puzzle game, which is a simplified version of the tetris mechanics.
Xyne is, unfortunately, a tough concept to describe, which is even more disappointing since the game itself is terribly simple. So it goes. As you learn more about the development of Xyne you'll see our attempts to communicate to the player the nature of the game in an appropriate manner. As you see above we aren't very effective telling people about it, so we'll be exploring other avenues of communication.
Before Xyne existed in code, it existed in the mind of RabydDonkey, a co-worker of mine. I believe he had the concept of driving a card game with puzzle elements in his mind. He let the idea gestate and came up with some mechanics for the puzzle concept and set about figuring out the SDK and platform he wanted to make the game on. I'm not sure, since I'm writing about his thoughts, but I believe he was looking to develop it for the OpenMoko platform back when it was first announced. Not sure what amount of hand wringing occurred but eventually he... started making a version for SDL. Thats a whole other story.

In the next post, we'll try to provide a better idea of where we are rather than where we've been.